A moment of light

It wasn't an inspiring afternoon but I wanted to take a break from making marmalade (11 jars) and after I'd been stomping around the wet woods and sticky fields for a while the sun came out and briefly illuminated  this little ruined hovel cottage. Facing west, with a steep valley slope behind it the place must have been almost sunless for most of the winter day. It's a damp and shady spot even in summer.

It was only recently that I learnt its name, Ceunant, which mean gorge, ravine, dingle or dell. The old man who told me had rambled around this area when he was a boy in the 1930s and he remembered the cottage being inhabited up until 70 years ago. As you can see it wasn't large - probably two rooms and a crog loft (sleeping platform above half the space) but now I find from a genealogy site that in 1891 Maria and Timothy Francis (a farm labourer) were living here with 6 children aged between 10 and 22. Doesn't bear thinking about does it?

Apart from a few damson trees that still bear fruit I've never found any human traces here but today, in the field below, I stumbled on a broken ginger beer bottle, with its top knocked off of course to get the precious marble stopper inside (strictly speaking it's known as a Codd bottle after its inventor Hiram Codd). I'm especially fond of this particular example because it comes from a local mineral water supplier who used as the logo on the bottle the off-shore pinnacle known as Needle Rock, which stands below the cliffs not two miles away. The extra shows the bottle with its logo which you can compare, if you wish,  with the real thing.

I wonder which one of those kids from Ceunant cottage got the marble: John, William, Margaret, Lydia, Jane or David?